Short notes and essays about stuff that interests me (mostly technical stuff).

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Coders at Work: Douglas Crockford

Chapter Three of Peter Seibel's Coders at Work contains his interview with Douglas Crockford.

I find the inclusion of Crockford in the book a little odd, because I don't really see him as much of a coder. You can see this in the interview: Crockford doesn't spend much time talking about code review, or source code control, or test harnesses, or debuggers, or the other sorts of things that occupy most waking seconds of most coders. When Crockford does talk about these things, he talks about his work at Basic Four, when he was using a Z80, or he talks about ideas from Multics; this is all relevant, but it's 30+ years old at this point.

I would describe Crockford as a language designer, because the work that has (rightfully) brought him attention and renown is his work in transforming the image (and reality) of JavaScript into its current position as the most important programming language in the world. So for that reason alone I think he is worth including in the book.

When I started learning about JavaScript about 10 years ago, the world was full of books talking about "DHTML" and telling you how to paste 3 ugly lines of JavaScript into your HTML form element so that when you clicked the Submit button, the JavaScript would check that your userid was not blank. Now we have Google Maps, and Yahoo Mail, and the Netflix movie browser UI, etc.: example after example of elegant, powerful, full-featured applications written in JavaScript.

Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the Crockford interview with the Eich interview (next chapter) is quite entertaining, as it has been the back-and-forth interaction between these two that has brought JavaScript to where it is. For example, in this chapter we get to hear Crockford say:

I can appreciate Brendan Eich's position there because he did some brilliant work but he rushed it and he was mismanaged and so bad stuff got out. And he's been cursed and vilified for the last dozen years about how stupid he is and how stupid the language is and none of that's true. There's actually brilliance there and he's a brilliant guy. So he's now trying to vindicate himself and prove, I'm really a smart guy and I'm going to show it off with this language that has every good feature that I've ever seen and we're going to put them all together and it's going to work.

And, next chapter, we get to hear this part of the story from Eich's point of view. So well done, Peter Seibel!

I found myself reading this chapter with an on-off switch: I kind of skimmed through the parts where Crockford discusses his work in his pre-JavaScript life, but when he talks about JavaScript, I found it much more interesting. He talks about the experience which has occurred to (probably) every experienced programmer who picked up JavaScript (certainly, it happened to me):

I understand why people are frustrated with the language. If you try to write in JavaScript as though it is Java, it'll keep biting you. I did this. One of the first things I did in the language was to figure out how to simulate something that looked sort of like a Java class, but at the edges it didn't work anything like it. And I would always eventually get pushed up against those edges and get hurt.

Eventually I figured out I just don't need these classes at all and then the language started working for me. Instead of fighting it, I found I was being empowered by it.

The key aspect of JavaScript which takes most Java programmers a long time to get past is the difference between abstraction-based-on-classification (Java) and abstraction-based-on-prototype (JavaScript), so it is here that I found Crockford's insights most fascinating:

Part of what makes programming difficult is most of the time we're doing stuff we've never done before. If it was stuff that had been done before we'd all be re-using something else. For most of what we do, we're doing something that we haven't done before. And doing things that you haven't done before is hard. It's a lot of fun but it's difficult. Particularly if you're using a classical methodology you're having to do classification on systems that you don't fully understand. And the likelihood that you're going to get the classification wrong is high.

Seibel: By "classical" you mean using classes.

Crockford: Right. I've found it's less of a problem in the prototypal world because you focus on the instances. If you can find one instance which is sort of typical of what the problem is, you're done. And generally you don't have to refactor those. But in a classical system you can't do that -- you're always working from the abstract back to the instance. And then making hierarchy out of that is really difficult to get right. So ultimately when you understand the problem better you have to go back and refactor it. But often that can have a huge impact on the code, particularly if the code's gotten big since you figured it out. So you don't....I've become a really big fan of soft objects. In JavaScript, any object is whatever you say it is. That's alarming to people who come at it from a classical perspective because without a class, then what have you got? It turns out you just have what you need, and that's really useful. Adapting your objects ... the objects that you want is much more straightforward.

I think this may be one of the most insightful and brilliant distillations of everything that's right with object-oriented programming, and everything that's wrong with object-oriented programming, that I've ever read. I've been doing object-oriented programming for 15 years, and I haven't seen such a concise, precise, and accurate critique of its essence in a long time.

I hope that Crockford continues to find an audience, and I hope that he continues to work on improving JavaScript. Although he can be a prickly and sharp-tongued fellow, he has a lot of interesting thoughts on this subject, and, particularly given the importance of the subject, I hope he continues to keep attention focused on this topic for a long time.